Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A History of God (1993)

  In 1201, while making the circumambulations around the Kabah, Ibn al-Arabi had a vision which had a profound and lasting effect upon him: he had seen a young girl, named Nizam, surrounded by a heavenly aura and he realized that she was an incarnation of Sophia, the divine Wisdom. This epiphany made him realize that it would be impossible for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of philosophy. Falsafah emphasized the utter transcendence of al-Lah and reminded us that nothing could resemble him. How could we love such an alien Being? Yet we can love the God we see in his creatures: “If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for he is the Beautiful Being,” he explained in the Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Meccan Revelations). “Thus in all its aspects, the object of love is God alone.”40 The Shahadah reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah. Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see God himself, but we can see him as he has chosen to reveal himself in such creatures as Nizam, who inspire love in our hearts. Indeed, the mystic had a duty to create his own epiphanies for himself in order to see a girl like Nizam as she really was. Love is essentially a yearning for something that remains absent; that is why so much of our human love remains disappointing. Nizam had become “the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure.” As he explained in the prelude to The Diwan, a collection of love poems: In the verses I have composed for the present book, I never cease to allude to the divine inspirations, the spiritual visitations, the correspondences [of our world] with the world of Angelic Intelligences. In this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life and because this young girl knew exactly what I was referring to.41 The creative imagination had transformed Nizam into an avatar of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  At his birth, Yahweh had annulled the covenant with Israel: “You are not my people and I am not your God.” 26 We shall see that the prophets were often inspired to perform elaborate mimes to demonstrate the predicament of their people, but it appears that Hosea’s marriage was not coldly planned from the beginning. The text makes it clear that Gomer did not become an esheth zeuunim until after their children had been born. It was only with hindsight that it seemed to Hosea that his marriage had been inspired by God. The loss of his wife had been a shattering experience, which gave Hosea an insight into the way Yahweh must feel when his people deserted him and went whoring after deities like Baal. At first Hosea was tempted to denounce Gomer and have nothing more to do with her: indeed, the law stipulated that a man must divorce an unfaithful wife. But Hosea still loved Gomer, and eventually he went after her and bought her back from her new master. He saw his own desire to win Gomer back as a sign that Yahweh was willing to give Israel another chance. When they attributed their own human feelings and experiences to Yahweh, the prophets were in an important sense creating a god in their own image. Isaiah, a member of the royal family, had seen Yahweh as a king. Amos had ascribed his own empathy with the suffering poor to Yahweh; Hosea saw Yahweh as a jilted husband, who still continued to feel a yearning tenderness for his wife. All religion must begin with some anthropomorphism. A deity which is utterly remote from humanity, such as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, cannot inspire a spiritual quest. As long as this projection does not become an end in itself, it can be useful and beneficial. It has to be said that this imaginative portrayal of God in human terms has inspired a social concern that has not been present in Hinduism. All three of the God- religions have shared the egalitarian and socialist ethic of Amos and Isaiah. The Jews would be the first people in the ancient world to establish a welfare system that was the admiration of their pagan neighbors. Like all the other prophets, Hosea was haunted by the horror of idolatry. He contemplated the divine vengeance that the northern tribes would bring upon themselves by worshipping gods that they had actually made themselves: And now they add sin to sin, they smelt images from their silver, idols of their own manufacture, smith’s work, all of it. “Sacrifice to them,” they say. Men blow kisses to calves!

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  He sits next to me with a wry smile. In the car he’d told me how he’d chosen poetry over his family’s penchant for law, partly to escape that preordered hamster wheel he was bred for. He’s opting for a game only history can measure his success in. (He didn’t mention how his father came home from Wall Street and read Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin.) How clear Warren’s green eyes are as he restates those to me noble convictions, and then he bends to kiss me with a mouth tasting of anise seed. Poetry will deliver him from his stultifying fate as it will me from my turbulent one. We’re sealed in that unlikely covenant already, with the vast house spread out around us as the dogs circle, tags clanking. Afterward, Warren leads me meandering through the scented rose garden and alongside the neat rows of vegetables. I think of Daddy’s pride at tomatoes staked in paint buckets on the porch under the clothesline sagging with dishrags. The tennis courts were razed for a huge pool. At the old stable—empty of horses—we feed carrots to the gray-muzzled donkeys. Once bought to keep the thoroughbreds calm, they’re fat court jesters who’ve taken over the place now the royal family’s died off. The family’s history is linked to horses. In my hometown, they’re used to cut cattle. As a kid, Warren and his sisters rode with their father before breakfast in the mornings. You had to make the high jump to get an extra serving of roast beef at dinner. Crossing the wide pantry, I spy the saucer of cookies and ask, Your mother still upstairs? Why are you whispering, sweetie? he asks, adding, Take another one if you like. How can you only eat one cookie? I say, biting down on one, then thumbing the fallen crumbs off my lip. My father’s always on some diet he can’t adhere to. It must’ve affected the rest of us, he says. Evening finds us seated at the long glossy table, half the length of a bowling alley, where his parents sit at opposite ends—his father portly in a tweed jacket with patched elbows; his mother blond and thin as a greyhound, smiling. Thank Mary for the Burgundy, Mrs. Whitbread says. You brought this? Mr. Whitbread holds his glass up. (In fact, I’d called the old bar I used to tend to find out what to bring.) It’s excellent. He takes a sip, adding, My own children think I’m rich enough to buy my own wine. I could never find one you liked, Warren says. Which prompts the first of many silences I’ll sit through at that table. Silence rolls across us like a gray sea fog. Ice crystals form around our faces. Forks freeze in place. The salad plates are cleared. Warren sits straight enough to be lashed to a stake. Kelley comes in hauling a massive tray where two capons lie prissily on curlicues of kale. Mr.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  When he starts to quote Yeats’s famous love poem, When you are old and gray and full of sleep/And nodding by the fire take down this book … I leap in to finish: And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep … And if there’d been a chaise longue nearby to land on, I might have stood up and swooned. The night before I graduate, he shows up at a bar where I dance with him all night while my putative suitor buys our drinks. In the wee hours, Warren quotes the famous pastoral proposition poem, Come live with me and be my love …The sixteenth-century version of Hubba, hubba, sweetcakes . My heart’s banging bongos. And four months later—after he’s driven cross-country to see me several times—he asks me to move to Cambridge with him. Three years after that, we’ll get engaged. But before any of that, I have to meet the family, and boy am I eager, facing the task with a peasant girl’s bouncy determination to wow people not overimpressed by much. The final miles Warren’s tiny car putters, I hold a compact in one hand and a mascara wand in the other, globbing on lashes. (Little did I know my mother’s advice— You can never wear too much mascara —is, in this company, deeply wrong.) We pass through wrought-iron gates, and I look up, wand in hand, to ask, Is this a subdivision ? This is my house, he says. It’s a testament to Warren’s reticence that he’s failed to mention the place is posh enough to sport a baronial-sounding name without seeming ridiculous: Fairweather Hall. There’s a separate wing for the live-in staff, severely reduced now that the six children are gone. If I remember right, the gardener even grew up on the estate since his father had been Mr. Whitbread’s valet in law school—sounding like a Chekhov serf to me. After Warren parks, I gawk my way from the car, jaw unhinged, about to burst out with a ghetto goddamn . Why didn’t you tell me about all this? I ask. Tell you about what? he wonders, completely sincere, for he’s never less than sincere, which partly informs my devotion. I already know how Warren shrinks from show. When people ask where he went to college, he’ll avoid dropping the H-bomb as long as possible, though I’d have tattooed it on my forehead. That ivy-scribbled house has a fairy-tale quality, with gardens sprawled around it and long, vaulted windows you could drive a Buick through. Plus a door bigger than my daddy’s bass boat, with a bronze knocker, even. The uniformed Irish maid waits outside to help us with our bags, which Warren refuses, partly because she’s at least seventy and no taller than five feet.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Two hundred years later, the Israelites were still taking part in fertility rites and sacred sex there, as we see in the oracles of the prophet Hosea, Amos’s contemporary. 20 Some Israelites appear to have thought that Yahweh had a wife, like the other gods: archaeologists have recently unearthed inscriptions dedicated “To Yahweh and his Asherah.” Hosea was particularly disturbed by the fact that Israel was breaking the terms of the covenant by worshipping other gods, such as Baal. Like all of the new prophets, he was concerned with the inner meaning of religion. As he makes Yahweh say: “What I want is love (hesed), not sacrifice; knowledge of God (daath Elohim), not holocausts.” 21 He did not mean theological knowledge: the word daath comes from the Hebrew verb yada: to know, which has sexual connotations. Thus J says that Adam “knew” his wife, Eve. 22 In the Old Canaanite religion, Baal had married the soil and the people had celebrated this with ritual orgies, but Hosea insisted that since the covenant, Yahweh had taken the place of Baal and had wedded the people of Israel. They had to understand that it was Yahweh, not Baal, who would bring fertility to the soil. 23 He was still wooing Israel like a lover, determined to lure her back from the Baals who had seduced her: When that day comes—it is Yahweh who speaks— she will call me, “My husband,” no longer will she call me, “My Baal.” I will take the names of the Baals off her lips, their names shall never be uttered again. 24 Where Amos attacked social wickedness, Hosea dwelt on the lack of inwardness in Israelite religion: the “knowledge” of God was related to “hesed,” implying an interior appropriation and attachment to Yahweh that must supersede exterior observance. Hosea gives us a startling insight into the way the prophets were developing their image of God. At the very beginning of his career, Yahweh seemed to have issued a shocking command. He told Hosea to go off and marry a whore (esheth zeuunim) because the whole country had “become nothing but a whore abandoning Yahweh.” 25 It appears, however, that God had not ordered Hosea to scour the streets for a prostitute: esheth zeuunim (literally, “a wife of prostitution”) meant either a woman with a promiscuous temperament or a sacred prostitute in a fertility cult. Given Hosea’s preoccupation with fertility rituals, it seems likely that his wife, Gomer, had become one of the sacred personnel in the cult of Baal. His marriage was, therefore, an emblem of Yahweh’s relationship with the faithless Israel. Hosea and Gomer had three children, who were given fateful, symbolic names. The elder son was called Jezreel, after a famous battlefield, their daughter was Lo-Ruhamah (Unloved) and their younger son Lo-Ammi (Not-My-People).

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like the Gnostics, Kabbalists and early Trinitarians, Blake envisaged a kenosis , a self-emptying in the Godhead, who falls from his solitary heaven and becomes incarnate in the world. There is no longer an autonomous deity in a world of his own, who demands that men and women submit to an external, heteronymous law. There is no human activity which is alien to God; even the sexuality repressed by the Church is manifest in the passion of Jesus himself. God has died voluntarily in Jesus and the transcendent, alienating God is no more. When the death of God is complete, the Human Face Divine will appear: Jesus said; “Wouldst thou love one who never died For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by brotherhood. 11 Blake rebelled against the institutional churches, but some theologians were attempting to incorporate the Romantic vision into official Christianity. They also found the idea of a remote transcendent God both abhorrent and irrelevant, stressing instead the importance of subjective religious experience. In 1799, the year after Wordsworth and Coleridge had published the Lyrical Ballads in England, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) published On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers , his own Romantic manifesto, in Germany. Dogmas were not divine facts but simply “accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.” 12 Religious faith could not be confined to the propositions of the creeds: it involved an emotional apprehension and an interior surrender. Thought and reason had their place, but they could only take us so far. When we had come to the limit of reason, feeling would complete the journey to the Absolute. When he spoke of “feeling,” Schleiermacher did not mean a sloppy emotionalism but an intuition which drove men and women toward the infinite. Feeling was not opposed to human reason but an imaginative leap that takes us beyond the particular to an apprehension of the whole. The sense of God thus acquired arose from the depths of each individual rather than a collision with an objective Fact. Western theology had tended to overemphasize the importance of rationality ever since Thomas Aquinas, a tendency which had increased since the Reformation. Schleiermacher’s romantic theology was an attempt to redress the balance. He made it clear that feeling was not an end in itself and could not provide a complete explanation of religion. Reason and feeling both pointed beyond themselves to an indescribable Reality.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet as an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating its integrity, “God” was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed ideas about God—such as the Trinity and the Incarnation—that separated them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience of their mystics had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews. Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily concerned with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions had been mystically inclined, and the Muslims had quickly developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah . They attempted to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF ) that were supposed to have been favored by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one’s own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price. 29 At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748) had been a disciple of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of the fathers of Sufism. The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply from other religions, seeing it as the one, true faith, but Sufis by and large remained true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all rightly guided religion. Jesus, for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet of the interior life. Some even amended the Shahadah, the profession of faith, to say: “There is no god but al-Lah and Jesus is his Messenger,” which was technically correct but intentionally provocative. Where the Koran speaks of a God of justice who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d. 801) spoke of love, in a way that Christians would have found familiar: Two ways I love Thee: selfishly, And next, as worthy is of Thee. ’Tis selfish love that I do naught Save think on Thee with every thought. ’Tis purest love when Thou dost raise The veil to my adoring gaze.

• From A History of God (1993)

  All Muslims have a duty to make the hajj at least once in a lifetime if their circumstances permit. Naturally the pilgrims remember Muhammad, but the rites have been interpreted to remind them of Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael rather than their prophet. These rites look bizarre to an outsider—as do any alien social or religious rituals—but they are able to unleash an intense religious experience and perfectly express the communal and personal aspects of Islamic spirituality. Today many of the thousands of pilgrims who assemble at the appointed time in Mecca are not Arabs, but they have been able to make the ancient Arabic ceremonies their own. As they converge on the Kabah, clad in the traditional pilgrim dress that obliterates all distinctions of race or class, they feel that they have been liberated from the egotistic preoccupations of their daily lives and been caught up into a community that has one focus and orientation. They cry in unison, “Here I am at your service, O al-Lah,” before they begin the circumambulations around the shrine. The essential meaning of this rite is brought out well by the late Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati: As you circumambulate and move closer to the Kabah, you feel like a small stream merging with a big river. Carried by a wave you lose touch with the ground. Suddenly, you are floating, carried on by the flood. As you approach the centre, the pressure of the crowd squeezes you so hard that you are given a new life. You are now part of the People; you are now a Man, alive and eternal.… The Kabah is the world’s sun whose face attracts you into its orbit. You have become part of this universal system. Circumambulating around Al-lah, you will soon forget yourself.… You have been transformed into a particle that is gradually melting and disappearing. This is absolute love at its peak.34 Jews and Christians have also emphasized the spirituality of community. The hajj offers each individual Muslim the experience of a personal integration in the context of the ummah, with God at its center. As in most religions, peace and harmony are important pilgrimage themes, and once the pilgrims have entered the sanctuary violence of any kind is forbidden. Pilgrims may not even kill an insect or speak a harsh word. Hence the outrage throughout the Muslim world during the hajj of 1987, when Iranian pilgrims instigated a riot in which 402 people were killed and 649 injured.

• From A History of God (1993)

  During a severe illness, Ibn al-Arabi was converted to Sufism, however, and at the age of thirty he left Europe for the Middle East. He made the hajj and spent two years praying and meditating at the Kabah but eventually settled at Malatya on the Euphrates. Frequently called Sheikh al-Akbah, the Great Master, he profoundly affected the Muslim conception of God, but his thought did not influence the West, which imagined that Islamic philosophy had ended with Ibn Rushd. Western Christendom would embrace Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian God, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently, for the imaginative God of the mystics. In 1201, while making the circumambulations around the Kabah, Ibn al-Arabi had a vision which had a profound and lasting effect upon him: he had seen a young girl, named Nizam, surrounded by a heavenly aura and he realized that she was an incarnation of Sophia, the divine Wisdom. This epiphany made him realize that it would be impossible for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of philosophy. Falsafah emphasized the utter transcendence of al-Lah and reminded us that nothing could resemble him. How could we love such an alien Being? Yet we can love the God we see in his creatures: “If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for he is the Beautiful Being,” he explained in the Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Meccan Revelations). “Thus in all its aspects, the object of love is God alone.” 40 The Shahadah reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah. Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see God himself, but we can see him as he has chosen to reveal himself in such creatures as Nizam, who inspire love in our hearts. Indeed, the mystic had a duty to create his own epiphanies for himself in order to see a girl like Nizam as she really was. Love is essentially a yearning for something that remains absent; that is why so much of our human love remains disappointing. Nizam had become “the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure.” As he explained in the prelude to The Diwan , a collection of love poems: In the verses I have composed for the present book, I never cease to allude to the divine inspirations, the spiritual visitations, the correspondences [of our world] with the world of Angelic Intelligences.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Edna and Robert were together all the time. Her alibi for Harry was that she was studying acting. It was a period of drunkenness, of blindness, of living only with the hands and mouth and body. Edna let Harry go off alone on his cruise. She was free now for six months. She and Robert lived together in New York, secretly. He had such magnetism in his hands that his touch, even his hand on her arm, sent warmth all through her. She lived open and sensitized to his presence. And his feeling about her voice was the same. He would telephone her at all hours to hear it. It was like a song luring him out of himself and out of his life. All other women were canceled by her voice. He entered her love with a sense of absolute possession, security. To hide and sleep in her, take her, enjoy her, they were all the same. There were no tensions, no moments of ambivalence, hatred. The lovemaking never became wild and cruel, an animal bout in which one strives to rape the other, force one’s way into the other and hurt with violence or desire. No, this was a melting together, a vanishing together into a soft, dark womb of warmth. Harry returned. And at the same time Dorothy came back from the West, where she had been working, sculpturing. She was herself now like a piece of highly polished wood, her features firm and chiseled, her voice earthy, her legs sturdy, her very nature hard and strong, like the work she did. She saw what had happened to Edna but did not know about her estrangement from Harry. She thought Robert had caused it, and hated him. She assumed he was a lover of the moment, just separating Harry and Edna for his own pleasure. She did not believe it was love. She fought Robert. She was cutting, biting. She herself was an impregnable virgin, though not puritanical or squeamish. She was open like a man, used lusty words, told bawdy stories, laughed about sex. But still she was impregnable to all.

• From Satyricon (1)

  (There) I catch sight of Giton laden with towels and scrapers, leaning, downhearted and embarrassed, against the wall. You could see that he did not serve of his own free will. Then, that I might assure myself that I saw aright, “Take pity on me, brother,” he cried, turning towards me a face lighted up with joy, “there are no arms here, I can speak freely take me away from that bloody robber, and punish your penitent judge as severely as you like. To have perished, should you wish it, will be a consolation great enough in my misery!” Fearing some one might overhear our plans, I bade him hush his complaints and, leaving Eumolpus behind --for he was reciting a poem in the bath--I pull Giton down a dark and dirty passage, after me, and fly with all speed to my lodgings. Arriving there, I slam the door shut, embrace him convulsively, and press my face against his which is all wet with tears. For a long time, neither of us could find his voice, and as for the lad, his shapely bosom was heaving continuously with choking sobs. “Oh the disgraceful inconsistency of it all,” I cried, “for I love you still, although you abandoned me, and no scar from that gaping wound is left upon this breast! What can you say that will justify you in yielding your love to a stranger? Did I merit such an affront?” He held his head higher when he found that he was loved. For one to love, and at the same time, blame, That were a labor Hercules to tame! Conflicting passions yield in Cupid’s name. (“And furthermore,” I went on), “I was not the one that laid the cause of our love before another judge, but I will complain no more, I will remember nothing, if you will prove your penitence by keeping faith.” He wiped his face upon his mantle, while I poured out these words, with groans and tears. “Encolpius,” said he, “I beseech you, I appeal to your honest recollection, did I leave you, or did you throw me over? For my part, I admit, and openly at that, that I sought, refuge with the stronger, when I beheld two armed men.” I kissed that, bosom, so full of prudence, threw my arms around his neck and pressed him tightly against my breast, that he might see unmistakably that he had gotten back into my good graces, and that our friendship lived again in perfect confidence. CHAPTER THE NINETY-SECOND.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  She felt Robert’s antagonism exultantly. She loved the fire and angry demons in him, biting, snarling at her. What she hated above all was that most men in her presence wilted, grew small and feeble. Only the timid ones approached her, as if to seek her strength. She wanted to shatter them, seeing the way they crawled toward her treelike body. The idea of letting them push their penis between her legs was like allowing some insect to crawl over her. Whereas she gloried in the struggle to push Robert out of Edna’s life, to humiliate him, demolish him. The three of them would sit together, Edna hiding her feelings about Harry, Robert not offering to take her away, not thinking, living only in the romantic present—dreamer. Dorothy accused him of this. Edna defended him; all the time she sat there thinking of the fiery way Robert took her the first time, the narrow little couch on which they lay, the dusty rug on which they rolled; thinking of his hands, the way they penetrated her. Edna said to her sister, “You cannot understand. You have never been in love like this.” Then Dorothy was silenced. The two sisters slept in adjoining rooms. There was a big bathroom between the rooms. Harry had gone again for six months. Edna let Robert come to her room at night. One morning looking out of the window, Dorothy saw Edna leave the house. She did not know that Robert was still in her room asleep. She went into the bathroom to take a bath. Edna had left her door open, and Dorothy, thinking herself alone, did not trouble to close it. On this door there was a mirror. Dorothy came into the bathroom and dropped her kimono. She pinned her hair up, she made up her face. Her body was magnificent. Every movement she made before the mirror brought out the provocative full, taut curves of her breasts and buttocks. Her hair was full of lights; she brushed it. Her breasts danced as she moved. She stood on her toes to make up her eyelashes. And Robert, on awakening, found himself looking at this spectacle from the bed, everything mirrored before him. Suddenly his whole body flushed with warmth. He threw off the covers. Dorothy was still visible in the mirror. She was leaning over to pick up her hairbrush. Robert could not bear any more. He went to the bathroom and stood there. Dorothy made no outcry. He was naked, his penis thrust out towards her, his brown eyes burning her.

• From Satyricon (1)

  (There) I catch sight of Giton laden with towels and scrapers, leaning, downhearted and embarrassed, against the wall. You could see that he did not serve of his own free will. Then, that I might assure myself that I saw aright, “Take pity on me, brother,” he cried, turning towards me a face lighted up with joy, “there are no arms here, I can speak freely take me away from that bloody robber, and punish your penitent judge as severely as you like. To have perished, should you wish it, will be a consolation great enough in my misery!” Fearing some one might overhear our plans, I bade him hush his complaints and, leaving Eumolpus behind --for he was reciting a poem in the bath--I pull Giton down a dark and dirty passage, after me, and fly with all speed to my lodgings. Arriving there, I slam the door shut, embrace him convulsively, and press my face against his which is all wet with tears. For a long time, neither of us could find his voice, and as for the lad, his shapely bosom was heaving continuously with choking sobs. “Oh the disgraceful inconsistency of it all,” I cried, “for I love you still, although you abandoned me, and no scar from that gaping wound is left upon this breast! What can you say that will justify you in yielding your love to a stranger? Did I merit such an affront?” He held his head higher when he found that he was loved. For one to love, and at the same time, blame, That were a labor Hercules to tame! Conflicting passions yield in Cupid’s name. (“And furthermore,” I went on), “I was not the one that laid the cause of our love before another judge, but I will complain no more, I will remember nothing, if you will prove your penitence by keeping faith.” He wiped his face upon his mantle, while I poured out these words, with groans and tears. “Encolpius,” said he, “I beseech you, I appeal to your honest recollection, did I leave you, or did you throw me over? For my part, I admit, and openly at that, that I sought, refuge with the stronger, when I beheld two armed men.” I kissed that, bosom, so full of prudence, threw my arms around his neck and pressed him tightly against my breast, that he might see unmistakably that he had gotten back into my good graces, and that our friendship lived again in perfect confidence. CHAPTER THE NINETY-SECOND.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On the evening of February 17, when he went to his room with his two younger sons to pray, he was suddenly taken ill once more, with chest pains and coldness. Jonas and the Mansfeld preacher Michael Coelius immediately rushed to his room, and he was again rubbed with hot cloths. Countess Anna of Mansfeld was summoned to provide unicorn horn—actually the tusk of a narwhal—believed to be a powerful restorative, and Count Albrecht himself grated some of it into a glass of wine. Conrad von Wolfframsdorf, one of Albrecht’s councilors, took a spoonful of it first—perhaps because Luther feared that he would be poisoned, perhaps because he mistrusted such medicine.14 At about 9 P.M., Luther lay down to nap, and slept peacefully for an hour. When he awoke, he asked those who had kept watch, “Are you still sitting up?” He wondered if they wanted to go to bed themselves. He then walked into the next room, presumably the privy, and as he crossed the threshold, he spoke the words “Into your hand I commend my spirit, You have redeemed me, God of truth.” Returning to bed, he shook each person’s hand and wished them good night, telling them to pray for God and his gospel, “because the Council of Trent”—the meeting of the council of the Catholic Church that initiated the Counter-Reformation had finally begun in December 1545—“and the evil Pope fights bitterly with him.”15 Jonas, Luther’s two sons Martin and Paul, his servant Ambrosius, and other servants kept watch by the bed. Around one in the morning he awoke, complaining again of cold and pain in the chest. “I think I will stay here at Eisleben where I was born and baptized,” he told Jonas with his usual wry humor. Again he walked into the privy unaided, repeating the same words as before.16 Johann Aurifaber, Coelius, two doctors, the owner of the house, and a clutch of local dignitaries and their wives had joined those looking after him, and he was again rubbed and given warmed cushions.17 He did not receive the last rites, in line with his conviction that extreme unction was not a sacrament: He trusted instead in his baptism. Luther spoke his final prayer, thanking God “that you revealed to me your dear Son Jesus Christ, in whom I believe, whom I have preached and proclaimed [and] whom the accursed Pope and all the godless shame, persecute and blaspheme against.” Even at the last, Luther balanced his love with his anger.18

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  2 Spalatin in Altenburg and Johann Agricola in Eisleben were close enough to be part of this group. Wenzeslaus Linck in Nuremberg was a friend from the very first days; Luther described him as “one of my dearest friends on earth.” 3 Jonas, who had once worshipped Erasmus, transferred his affection wholesale to Luther, whom he always respectfully addressed as “father”; part of the strength of their bond derived from their shared experience of melancholy. 4 Jonas was no stranger to grief; seven of his thirteen children by his first marriage had died, his thirteen-year-old son drowning in the River Saale in 1541 and his wife dying in childbirth the following year, together with the baby. 59. This image, which prefaced the Frankfurt pirate edition of Luther’s Table Talk in 1569, shows the inner circle seated around a table with Luther on the right; Johann Forster and Paul Eber are shown in addition to the original “team.” Luther, who scarcely left Wittenberg in his last years, lived inside these protective circles of friends and allies just as his Saxon Church existed within the safety of the Elector’s lands. The friendships mixed private interaction with an overriding sense of duty to the new Church, in Wittenberg and beyond. In Wittenberg, surrounded by students and people from all over the empire eager to study with Luther and Melanchthon, it was easy to forget just how precarious the Reformation outside the town still was, and how chaotic the situation created by Luther’s assault upon the time-honored customs, beliefs, and practices of Catholicism. Men who had once been Catholic priests or monks did not always succeed in becoming exemplary evangelical pastors. The pastor of Sausedlitz went around with a rifle, which he delighted in firing in the village. He hung out in the tavern and maltreated his wife, starting a suspicious liaison with a local widow. 5 Those who copied Luther and excoriated the failings of the elite from the pulpit could soon find themselves isolated. No fewer than fifteen individuals, including the mayor, were happy to testify against the preacher of Werdau, who had insulted the councilors as “Herods” and “Caiaphases.” 6 Johannes Heine, the pastor at Elssnig, near Torgau, had a sideline in herbal and magical healing, claiming that his cures were not magical but accomplished “through God’s grace, which was given to him.” His unworthy conduct was reported during a Church Visitation and he was thrown into prison.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In his last letters, Johann von Staupitz had written of his love for his former protégé, “surpassing that of women.”17 As monks, nuns, and priests broke their vows by marrying, he castigated Luther for letting fleshly lusts have their sway under the cover of the gospel—this was not what he had meant by Gelassenheit. Although he sent Luther a young monk to be instructed in the ways of the gospel—a sign of his trust—he clearly saw Luther as having chosen a different path. For his part, Luther was still raw from Staupitz’s decision to leave the Augustinians for, of all things, a fat prebend as a Benedictine abbot. Indeed, when the news came of Staupitz’s death, Luther commented waspishly that the old man had had little time to enjoy his plum posting. There is no doubt that Staupitz would have been appalled by Luther’s marriage, and to a nun—a double violation of oaths of chastity. Perhaps it was only when Staupitz had died that Luther, freed from the man who had been his spiritual father, finally felt able to become a father.18 The delay was also connected with deep changes within Luther himself. It took several years for him to accept that he, too, had fleshly desires. He had always claimed that continence was not his problem as a monk—the “real knots” were to do with salvation. Nor had he greeted the first marriages of priests with unalloyed joy, but rather had fretted that Bernhardi, the first evangelical priest to marry, would be expelled and then “two stomachs” along with “anything that came out of them” (Luther was referring darkly to children) would suffer want.19 Indeed, Luther’s conviction of the pervasiveness of sin had remarkably little to do with a sense of sexual frustration. Although by 1520 he had advocated that priests should be allowed to marry, he did not at first think that monks were in the same situation, as they had taken vows of chastity of their own free will and could not therefore break them. When the first evangelical clergy married, it was Karlstadt, not Luther, who wrote a set of theses and then a pamphlet in their support, even proposing that only married men should become priests. And it was Karlstadt who then justified the marriage of monks because sexual continence was just another vain attempt to secure salvation through works. Luther originally objected to this line of reasoning, but he eventually approved it, using much the same arguments.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I sank into my window seat and tried to lose myself in the newspaper and in-flight movie. On the ground in Portland, I’d expected my sister to pick me up at curbside, as we’d discussed. As I disembarked from the plane, I was surprised to see Dad and Lory waiting for me at the gate. The moment I saw them, my heart skipped a beat and I was practically overcome by the love and affection I felt for them. It brought tears to my eyes. I’d missed them more than I’d allowed myself to admit. It was Thursday night, so they were both missing meetings at the Kingdom Hall. Their presence elevated my dreary mood, and we all talked excitedly on the car ride to my parents’ house. When we arrived, I walked through the front door and called out to Mom, who was already there, preparing a light dinner of soup and salad. I heard her exclaim from the kitchen to no one, “Lindy’s here.” She dropped what she was doing and came out to give me a hug. As much as she had irritated me over the months with her nagging, it was all forgotten in that moment. I was so happy to see her, standing there, smiling, in her quilted bathrobe and slippers. When I carried my suitcase into my old bedroom, I found a WELCOME HOME sign tacked up at each corner of the closet. It felt magical, a rainbow of bright metallic colors strung together, as if the letters were dancing arm in arm, saluting me. No one had ever done something like that for me, and I understood what it must feel like to celebrate one’s birthday or discover an unexpected surprise in one’s honor. “That was Lory’s idea,” Dad said, popping his head in to call me to dinner. Mom, Dad, Lory, and I sat around the kitchen table, slurping soup, chatting idly about this and that. Ove had gone to conduct the meeting at the Kingdom Hall and was expected to drop by later to say hello and take Lory home. “Where’s Randy?” I asked, realizing no one had uttered a word about my brother since my arrival. Lory stopped chewing. “We’re not going to see him, I’m afraid.” Mom’s voice was weary. Dad shook his head as she spoke, staring into his soup bowl. “They’ve decided to skip this trip,” he said, still looking down. My chest tightened, and I swallowed hard. “Because of me?” I asked, looking from person to person, seeing confirmation in each downcast expression. Just then, bread popped out of the toaster. No one moved. “They’re boycotting Black Butte because of me?” The annoyed looks on their faces told me Randy’s decision was controversial. I surmised it had generated a fair amount of consternation among them in the days leading up to my arrival. The entire family had always gone to Black Butte together.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Edna and Robert were together all the time. Her alibi for Harry was that she was studying acting. It was a period of drunkenness, of blindness, of living only with the hands and mouth and body. Edna let Harry go off alone on his cruise. She was free now for six months. She and Robert lived together in New York, secretly. He had such magnetism in his hands that his touch, even his hand on her arm, sent warmth all through her. She lived open and sensitized to his presence. And his feeling about her voice was the same. He would telephone her at all hours to hear it. It was like a song luring him out of himself and out of his life. All other women were canceled by her voice. He entered her love with a sense of absolute possession, security. To hide and sleep in her, take her, enjoy her, they were all the same. There were no tensions, no moments of ambivalence, hatred. The lovemaking never became wild and cruel, an animal bout in which one strives to rape the other, force one’s way into the other and hurt with violence or desire. No, this was a melting together, a vanishing together into a soft, dark womb of warmth. Harry returned. And at the same time Dorothy came back from the West, where she had been working, sculpturing. She was herself now like a piece of highly polished wood, her features firm and chiseled, her voice earthy, her legs sturdy, her very nature hard and strong, like the work she did. She saw what had happened to Edna but did not know about her estrangement from Harry. She thought Robert had caused it, and hated him. She assumed he was a lover of the moment, just separating Harry and Edna for his own pleasure. She did not believe it was love. She fought Robert. She was cutting, biting. She herself was an impregnable virgin, though not puritanical or squeamish. She was open like a man, used lusty words, told bawdy stories, laughed about sex. But still she was impregnable to all.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Are you a member of Triple A?” “No way.” He shook his head. “I’ve always been the sort to have a special girl in my life—though you happen to be catching me between girlfriends. Let me make that perfectly clear. I know myself well enough to know not having someone would be way more of a distraction than having one. The right one, that is. Not even my religious conversion will change that.” He’d as much as said he was looking for a wife. By the end of the evening, I, too, was calling him Rossman. He got my phone number from Bill and called me two days later. We started spending time together, either with groups of friends, or “alone” in public places, like restaurants. The Watch-tower Society discouraged single people of the opposite sex from spending time truly alone, which could lead to temptation and the sin of premarital sex. As I found myself falling in love with Ross, I appreciated the wisdom of chaperones. I had every intention of being a virgin when I married, and the sexual attraction I felt on first meeting Ross only grew as we spent time together. Thankfully, we had many friends in common, so group activities, such as skiing and going to movies, were not difficult to organize. My actions soon made it clear that I was not a tried-and-true member of the Triple A Club. Ross was working full-time for a maintenance-and-construction company while I kept busy pioneering, conducting Bible studies with interested people in the community, and working to cover modest expenses. When we spoke about the future, we included the possibility of pioneering or applying to Bethel as a couple. That made it easier for me to set aside my plans to go solo, dismissing them as distant and unlikely. Within four months we were engaged, and in another four months we were married. During our engagement, I experienced bouts of restlessness, sensing how far I was drifting from my dreams in which I ventured out as a single young woman; learned a new language; and traveled the world, preaching, teaching, and serving others while having grand adventures: ministering to children under tropical palms or reading soothing Bible verses to the destitute victims of heartless warlords in faraway lands. As I got to know Ross, I realized the emotional accessibility I originally found so attractive masked mood swings and self-doubt. I lacked the maturity to help him through those rough patches and often resented the need to. I contemplated breaking the engagement or postponing the wedding. We were both twenty-one years old. When I allowed myself to think about our inexperience, I got scared, sometimes waking in the middle of the night to full-throttle panic. We had very few financial resources between us, as we were both living paycheck to paycheck, and I didn’t believe the myth that two can live as inexpensively as one.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Stuff like that was important then. I loved my Mom that day as much as I ever did or probably ever will. I think I loved her because she suffered so long and still came out of it with a good heart. Maybe I feel guilty for being part of the cause of her suffering and love her to make up for it. Whyever I love her, I don’t think it’s just because she’s my mother. “Punkin,” Mom said. “I want you to know they broke the mold when they made your father.” So Mom lives in Seattle with her new husband now. She transferred to the Seattle Bon Marché. We talk more now, even though it’s only over the phone. I’ll spend a week with her after the season’s over. The University of Washington invited me to visit their campus, so I’ll do that then, too. Carla doesn’t think she’ll go along. IVIt’s dinnertime at the hotel and Elmo, the cook, asks me what it will be. I tell him a wheat-germ burger. Lean beef mixed with wheat germ. He keeps a couple in the fridge for me. Elmo is a big fan of the semipro football team I played a little for this fall. He thinks I’m crazy to lose all this weight just to get my body thrashed. He wants to see me play college ball, then go to the pros. There’s no way. I even got beat up playing my one season of high school ball. I tell him he’s the crazy one. “Those guys are creatures,” I say. “They’ll peel me and eat me!” The Spokes picked me up as a flanker. I’m pretty fast and I catch the ball. I’m not crazy about getting hit, though. They paid me twenty bucks a game. I was making pretty good money working five nights a week at the hotel and playing ball on Sundays. Otto played, too, but much more seriously than I did. Otto is a real football player. Football’s what will get him through college, and unless he gets hurt or something, he’ll go with the pros for sure. Tanneran played guard and Leeland Wain, the David Thompson varsity football coach, played quarterback. I’m pretty good friends with both Gene and Leeland, considering our age differences. I had to go out to Rollie’s Ribs after the game to pick up the extra tens this gambler friend of Elmo’s gave me for each score. Now that it’s legal to drink on Sundays, Rollie’s really blasts after the games. One night some other friend of Elmo’s was drinking or doping or both and decided I was white-assed and chickenshit and that he was going to cut me up and feed me to Rollie’s Afghan hound. I thought he described me pretty well and wasn’t about to argue. When he started after me with the world’s biggest pocketknife, all I could do was stand open-mouthed and greasy-handed.